Ai Weiwei, in collaboration with Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore - Benedicti Claustra Onlus, Berengo Studio and Fondazione Berengo, announces a new body of work set to be unveiled at a solo exhibition in Venice this summer. Marking the artist’s first experimentation with glass, which began in Beijing in 2009 and has culminated in a three-year project conceived in Murano, the works are filled with motifs from Ai Weiwei’s long and varied artistic career. Alongside some of the artist’s best-known and latest works in porcelain, wood and LEGO, the glass series will be presented within the dramatic setting of Venice’s Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore from 28th August to 27th November 2022.
The centrepiece of the artist’s glass series is La Commedia Umana, an enormous hanging sculpture comprised of over 2,000 pieces of black glass handcrafted by the maestros of Berengo Studio in Murano. Measuring more than six metres wide and almost nine metres high, the twisted monument is the largest hanging sculpture ever made in Murano glass in living history.